Still, the pronouncement bodes well for Plano-based Frito-Lay Inc., the nation’s largest snack maker.

The comments come as consumers are shying away from high-calorie carbonated soft drinks.

PepsiCo, more so than its chief rival Coke, has worked for years to transform itself into a food and beverage company, which decreases its reliance on soft drink sales.

Today the sales mix is almost evenly split between snacks and beverages.

“The business mix will shift and will be weighted toward snacks more than we are today,” said Johnston.

Last week, PepsiCo, the nation’s second-largest soft drink maker, said Frito-Lay posted 2012 operating profit of $3.65 billion. That made Frito-Lay the profit leader for the parent company, putting it ahead of PepsiCo’s U.S. beverage unit and operations abroad.

On the soft drink side of the business, PepsiCo is researching a new sweetener “that once commercialized, could potentially alter the trajectory of our cola business in a meaningful way,” Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s chairman and chief executive, said last week.

“While we are certainly encouraged by [PepsiCo’s] strong focus on innovation, we remain somewhat cautious on [its] execution of this evolutionary sweetener innovation and its role in potentially revitalizing” the company’s carbonated soft drink business.

“We think many factors need to be considered, including ultimate positioning of this sweetener so as not to hurt or negatively affect Pepsi’s existing low- and no-calorie franchises,” she said. “Time will tell.”